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Neil Brodie

Dan Contreras
John Merryman

INTER
Paul Harrison
Tom Seligman
Lynn Meskell

o n e i n an occasi onal seri es of arti cl es about mul ti di sci pl i nary teachi ng and re s e a rc h

JANuARy 28, 2009


ACTION

STANFORD RepORT
Buying, Selling,
Owning the Past

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C O L L A G E B y A n n A C O B B ; M A D E W I t H I M A G E S f R O M t H E C A n t O R C E n t E R f O R V I S u A L A R t S A t S t A n f O R D u n I V E R S I t y, P A u L H A R R I S O n A n D f L I C k R P H O t O S B y E R I C C H A n , R O B I n Z E B R O W S k I , n O A H G R A y, L A R A E A k I n S , A n D D I M I t A R D E n E V .
Buying, Selling,
Owning
the Past
NEIL BRODIE

J oe G era n io L.A. CICERO


The Early Bronze Age cemetery
of Bab adh-Dhra near the
Dead Sea. The pockmarked
soil, visible from above, is
evidence of looters’ work.

Neil Brodie and Dan Contreras


in front of a projection of the
Google Earth map, which they
use to study sites in Lebanon.

C
rates of 15th-century objects found at shaking his head. “They won’t belongs to all of us as humans
Machu Picchu in the early 20th century concede any role to collectors John Merryman, generally credited and therefore should not neces-
today are housed at Yale University, and and dealers.” sarily remain in, for example,
Peru plans to sue to get them back. Merryman, generally cred- with establishing the field of art law, Guatemala; or, instead, one
The so-called Elgin Marbles were re- ited with establishing the field could argue that pre-Columbian
moved from the Parthenon in the early of art law, is interested in the is interested in the distinction between art is part of Guatemala’s specific
19th century and taken to London, distinction between heritage heritage, even though Guatemala
where they have been displayed ever and property. To his mind, heritage and property. To his mind, as such did not exist in the 15th
since. Athens’ new Acropolis Museum heritage is fuzzy and intangi- century, and should therefore re-
has a wing sitting empty, awaiting their return. ble, and therefore more easily heritage is fuzzy and intangible. main there.
Nearly a decade of litigation followed the discovery
of 9,000-year-old skeletal remains near Kennewick,
manipulated by source nations
and their champions. Claims of 4 One of the more prominent
participants in this debate is the
Wash., as American Indian tribes and scientists dis- “cultural heritage” do not suf- director of the Art Institute of
puted ownership based on “cultural affiliation.” fice, in his mind, as ownership claims. Chicago, James Cuno, who argued in a
And the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul (The term cultural property first arose recent book that stewardship and broad
Getty Museum is on trial in Rome, accused of han- with the 1954 Hague Convention for access should take priority over legal
dling illegally excavated antiquities. the Protection of Cultural Property ownership, given that most countries
Stanford’s archaeologists and other scholars who after the massive destruction of World claiming objects—Greece, Egypt, India,
study the old objects we call “art” or “antiquities” fre- War II.) for example—are recent creations.
quently find themselves intervening in such contro- Archaeologists criticize Merryman “That’s fine,” Brodie replied rhetori-
versies. The past decades have seen a booming inter- for condoning the buying and selling cally to Cuno’s argument, “but I’d add
national antiquities market in the context of sharply of unprovenanced antiquities, a mar- that there wasn’t any ‘art’ as we know it
defined sentiments of nationalism and ownership on ket he considers logical given what he until the 18th century either. It’s equally
the part of former colonies. Violent upheavals such calls “the human appetite for antiqui- constructed. Objects removed from their
as the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and ties.” He is the author of an article ar- context become ‘antiquities.’ The real
John Merryman
Iraq— all sites of remarkable ancient treasures—fuel guing that Lord Elgin’s acquisition of question is sovereignty, not ownership—
the market. National and international bodies, most the marbles was legal and ethical for its the right of a country to have its heritage
notably UNESCO, have tried to curtail the illicit traf- time, and therefore should not be overturned now. laws respected by other countries.” This is also his ob-
ficking. Still, the world’s museums are full of objects On the other side is Neil Brodie, cultural heritage jection to what he calls Merryman’s “object-centered
that many people think don’t belong there. resource director at Stanford’s Archaeology Center. discourse of ownership.” Instead, he said, let’s look at
There are some, such as Stanford Law School Pro- He is the former research director of the Illicit Antiq- knowledge, at heritage.
fessor Emeritus John Merryman (88 and still teach- uities Research Centre at the University of Cambridge
ing), who say what’s done is done. In his view, ar- and an international expert on looting and the trade Looting the Middle East
chaeologists, including those at Stanford, are too in unprovenanced artifacts. “Everyone in this room has seen evidence of loot-
inflexible. The ownership-heritage argument can be tricky: ing, I’m sure,” Stanford archaeologist Daniel Contre-
“They say, ‘Collectors are the real looters,’” he said, One could say that pre-Columbian art, for example, ras recently told an audience at the Archaeology Cen-

10 STANFORD Report January 28, 2009


co u r t es y P a u l H arriso n

E iri k New t h I ris & B . G erald C a n t or C e n t er f or V is u al A r t s a t S t a n f ord U n iversi t y

A terracotta vase, c.
430 B.C., owned by
the Cantor Center.

L ara E a k i n s W es & E li S ha u n C he

ter. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been at a site where there and sell it to feed their children. Those stories can’t Safi, that has suffered the most looting. “This was in-
hasn’t been looting.” explain how the antiquities markets were flooded with dustrial scale,” he said, “and the material was headed
After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, ar- Jordanian Early Bronze Age materials in the 1990s, straight for the antiquities market. So this can be a
chaeologist Elizabeth Stone, who teaches at Stony said Brodie, who believes the looting is an organized tool to stimulate policy.”
Brook University, wanted to quantify anecdotal in- response to a market, not the other way around. In theory, Brodie and Contreras say, using Google
formation about the pillaging of the “cradle of civili- Archaeologists are increasingly being trained in Earth for tracking looting could be an open-source
zation.” Funded by a variety of sources, she obtained geospatial techniques, and there is an active geo- project. People could add information and photos,
satellite images of some 1,800 sites in southern Iraq graphic information systems (GIS) community at monitor particular areas or issue alerts as images re-
taken before the invasion. By studying before and af- Stanford. Archaeologists here have used GIS for proj- veal possible pillaging. Such a project also could be
ter shots, she was able to identify looting patterns that ects in Mexico and Peru; the Spatial History Project, combined with a comparative pixel analysis of remote
revealed what was being taken and from where. led by historian Richard White, comprises several re- sensing images of pitted landscapes.
There are some who insist that reports of looting search paths using GIS; and staff at Branner Library The drawbacks to using Google Earth to moni-
in Iraq are the result of deluded journalists echoing and academic technology specialists are helping schol- tor archaeological looting are, principally, two: The
scholars with an agenda. ars in many disciplines incorporate GIS into their re- images are not always good, and you have to know
Brodie will have none of that. “There is no debate search. Contreras, a Stanford PhD and a lecturer in what you’re looking for. You can’t just scan the globe
about the looting,” he said. “We know what happened. the Anthropology Department, teaches a course called in hopes of finding pits. Brodie and Contreras chose
Media like to think we don’t.” Digital Methods in Archaeology. Jordan because they had a good database with which
Inspired by Stone’s example, Brodie and Contre- Contreras found that Google Earth was more effec- to compare the images. Contreras will next apply the
ras wanted to do something similar for the approxi- tive if used in conjunction with GIS software. So he technique to Peru, his area of expertise, for which he
mately 9,0000 square kilometers of Jordan. The prob- exported the geo-referenced Google images of Jordan also has a lot of data. So it’s not perfect. But, he said,
lem was that satellite images like Stone’s would have into ArcGIS, which makes it possible to precisely esti- “I reservedly recommend it.”
cost around $1.6 million, far beyond the resources of mate the extent of looted areas. Looting is detected by
the Archaeology Center. So they asked, what about the appearance of swaths dotted with pits that from From the caves of Afghanistan
Google Earth? They could pay $400 a year for the the air look like pockmarks. One of the chief arguments for removing antiqui-
deluxe version, put those images next to data gleaned “It’s almost like a smoking gun,” Contreras said, if ties from their site of provenance is safety.
from a good database and then trace the damage. an area near known Bronze Age sites is pockmarked “When people say, ‘It’s safer with us,’ I always reply,
“We wanted to see if Google Earth would be good and shortly thereafter the catalogs start advertising ‘Look at 9/11.’ There is no guarantee of safety in this
enough for this task,” Contreras explained. “Up un- those items. “John Merryman says enforcement will world,” said anthropology Professor Lynn Meskell.
til now, the evidence has been anecdotal. This will be never stop the market, and he is partly right. But there Beyond the fallacy of physical security, Meskell and
more systematic. We’ll be able to get a much better is educational potential on the demand side. If buy- others detect (and condemn) elitism in the assump-
idea of how many pits there are. And if people say ers were shown these images of damage, then they tion that an old bowl is better off in my city than in
there’s no looting in Jordan, now we’ll be able to say, couldn’t have in their head the image of a poor farmer your backyard, or in my climate-controlled museum
‘Oh yes there is.’” who sells a single pot to feed his children. Instead, than in your shabby building.
Above all, they wanted to have evidence to counter there are photos of large-scale, systematic looting, and But there are cases that stand out, and Afghanistan
those who insist on “chance find” stories—tales of sol- buyers are participating in the destruction.” obviously is one. By 1996, after the Soviet withdrawal
itary villagers who discover the odd pot here and there He showed an image of one of the Jordanian sites, and when the country was torn apart by internal war-

January 28, 2009 STANFORD Report 11


L.A. CICERO

fare, its archaeological sites were ransacked, and it


was feared that the Kabul museum’s collections had
gone missing. (In fact, museum staff managed to
hide and save much of the holdings.) Few archae-
ologists or scholars would argue that in the case of
intentional destruction or bombing, artifacts should
not be removed. (Where they should be held in safe-
keeping can be a matter of controversy; the Hoover
Institution garnered some unwanted headlines last
summer when it was revealed that it was providing a
temporary haven for Baath Party records taken out
of Baghdad.) Brodie’s position, also that of the pro-
fession in general, is that museums or other institu-
tions may hold endangered objects in safekeeping,
but no money may change hands.
Since the 1990s, and especially after the Taliban
blew up the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan in 2001, pro-
fessionals both inside and outside Afghanistan have
struggled to ensure the survival of manuscripts and
artifacts. Paul Harrison, the George Edwin Burnell
Professor of Religious Studies, is one of the editors
of a remarkable collection of ancient Buddhist man-
uscripts held by the Schøyen Collection, headquar-
tered in Oslo, Norway. That collection also has been
the subject of controversy.
Some of the manuscripts—all of which Schøyen
asserts were legally obtained—were found in caves.
They are among the earliest known Buddhist docu-
ments, written in two scripts, Brahmi and Khar- Paul Harrison with a computer monitor displaying the Sanskrit texts he is studying. The Sambadhavakasa Sutra, which instructs Buddhists in
osthi, dating from the second century AD onward. the practice of meditation. This manuscript is part of a hitherto unknown collection of sutras, which are scriptural texts that are often recited.
Learning to read the scripts, Harrison says simply,
was “painful,” and thousands of fragments remain
to be identified. Through these pieces, he said, “we people smuggling pieces, including things that are right. They could be used to rebuild the country
have learned a new language we had only hypoth- used in temples, and then they show up in yuppies’ [through tourism] and help those who most need it.
esized about.” apartments in New York. I mean, dealers come to our They care about these objects, they know them. Peo-
Using carbon testing, colleagues in Berlin and [scholarly] conferences. There’s an unholy alliance ple in Pretoria and the cities don’t.”
at the University of Washington have dated simi- between dealers and scholars. Partly this is because In North America, the most obvious instance of
lar Buddhist manuscripts recently discovered in of all the political upheaval; people flee to the caves, this debate takes place around American Indians
Afghanistan and Pakistan to the first century AD, they explore, they find things.” and the 1990 federal Native American Graves Pro-
said Harrison, a philologist by training. “So the tection and Repatriation Act (NAGPR A), under
Ownership of history which certain objects with “cultural
dates have been pushed back, and this is very excit-
ing, very big news. Our knowledge of the Buddhist Theft and looting may be hard to pin affiliation” to certain descendants and
canon is increasing enormously. There was a huge down, but no one would argue that theft tribes must be returned by museums.
amount of literary activity; we’ve even found frag- is legal. That, at least, is clear cut. More At Stanford, anthropologist Michael
ments of a play.” murky is the matter of history itself. Who Wilcox, himself an American Indian,
But the discovery of such remarkable texts was can lay claim to Etruscan art? Should recently was on a task force of the
possible only because someone dug them up and Muslims inhabiting formerly Buddhist American Anthropological Associa-
sold them on the black market. How they got to Eu- lands care about the ruins around them? tion that commented on new modi-
rope is a mystery. Do the Elgin Marbles belong in Athens? fications of the law. Though he sup-
“These objects have no clear provenance,” Harri- Should objects be shipped back where ports NAGPRA, he also is troubled
son said. “They were accidentally unearthed or dug they came from? by its implications.
up by fortune hunters, and there are no records. The Figuring out the ethics of heritage in- “Indian people must demonstrate
objects were smuggled from Afghanistan to Paki- volves weighing the value of the object’s connections to a past that has been
context against the value of the viewer’s Lynn Meskell created by a professional and
stan, and somehow ended up in London. The col-
lectors have had the sense to make them available gaze; the village versus the mu- theoretical dialogue that has
to us. Our view is that ownership is one thing, but seum. ‘There should be more of an exchange, explicitly excluded them,”
the information belongs to everybody. But, honestly, “The value of antiquities is the Wilcox wrote. “Indians are
there is a certain moral unease about the whole thing story of their culture and their partnership. It’s not our stuff, and we asked to demonstrate our rela-
which is not easily resolved.” use, and when they’re treated only tion to the static cultures that
Contreras and Brodie’s position, that it is the as objects, they lose that,” Con- shouldn’t have it just because we can,’ archaeologists and museums
market for antiquities that ensures that looting will treras said. “Ownership, context have affirmed, reproduced
and use add up to a very interest- Meskell said. and codified in professional
take place, has echoes in Afghanistan.
“Do researchers owe their discoveries to the ing pattern of behavior that tells 4 journals.”
smugglers?” Harrison asked rhetorically. “That’s us about trading, culture, society, The web of interests and
right, you’re in the position of helping create the gender and so on. One pot out of cla ims enveloping t he se
market. There’s a terrible problem across Asia with context doesn’t tell us that.” shards, bones, sculptures and masks is dense indeed.
Meskell, whose work is in southern Africa, is ada- Law, the legacy of colonialism, aesthetics, human
C o u r t es y o f C a n t or A r t s C e n t er
mant. “We know nothing about these objects outside history, property ... it’s not easy to sort out.
of their context,” she said. “We look at their design, “With cases like the Kennewick Man or with the
and they might as well come from Ikea. We look at Elgin Marbles, the most important thing is to wrestle
objects from Mali and we ‘recognize’ them because with the ideas,” Contreras said. “I don’t have an an-
we have seen them in Ikea. We look with a colonial, swer. But at least let’s think about it. There are hard-
imperial gaze. We don’t recognize. We don’t know liners on both sides.” S R
who made it or why.
“There should be more of an exchange, partner-
ship. It’s not our stuff, and we shouldn’t have it just
because we can.”
But sorting it out is not simple. Cuno, director of REL ATED INFORMATION
the Art Institute of Chicago, has proposed a system
of partage, whereby objects of universal value would Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAG-
be shared by the source nation, even if the nation PRA) http://www.nps.gov/history/nagpra
did not exist when the object was created, and the Cultural Heritage Resource
financers of the exploration. http://www.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal
“I think Cuno is disingenuous,” said Tom Selig-
man, director of Stanford’s Cantor Center for Visual Stanford Archaeology Center
https://www.stanford.edu/dept/archaeology/cgi-bin/drupal
Arts. “Partage is fine; I have no objection to that.
But then he throws in that nation-state stuff. In the Schøyen Collection
absence of Etruscans, you have to speak with Italy. http://www.schoyencollection.com/Buddhism.htm
Whom else would you negotiate partage with?” GIS at Stanford
So, send the stuff back? “Some people say if you http://gissig.stanford.edu/?cat=1
‘Some people say if you return things, return things, they’ll be lost forever,” Seligman said. “Patterns of Looting in Southern Iraq,” by Elizabeth Stone
“Maybe.” He shrugged.
they’ll be lost forever,’ Or maybe not. Who’s to say where objects are
http://www.savingantiquities.org/feature_page.
php?featureID=11
better off? Referring to Africa, Meskell said artifacts
Seligman said. “must remain with the communities of connection, “The Market in Iraqi Antiquities 1980-2008,” by Neil Brodie
4 the most impoverished people. They believe money https://www.stanford.edu/group/chr/cgi-bin/drupal/files/
Market%20in%20Iraqi%20antiquities%20(2008)%20txt.pdf
would flow in if they had them, and maybe they’re

12 STANFORD Report January 28, 2009

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